(DCNF)—The U.S. government has approved an alarming number of criminals, gangbangers and alleged murderers for a special classification originally intended for vulnerable migrant children.
Earlier in June, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) revealed shocking findings about the Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) program, a little-known classification that can provide a pathway to permanent residency and citizenship to young illegal migrants who’ve been abandoned or abused by their parents. Investigators discovered that, over the past decade, the SIJ program has experienced a wave of petitions from criminals and adults over 18.
USCIS Director Joseph Edlow — who was sworn in as USCIS director in July — predicts these findings may just be the tip of the iceberg.
“Unfortunately, I do expect to uncover more,” Edlow said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The SIJ program has been something that I think USCIS has not been administering appropriately for many years.”
Created by Congress under the Immigration Act of 1990, the SIJ program allows young illegal migrants who a juvenile court determined cannot be reunited with one or both parents because of abandonment, abuse or neglect to apply for SIJ classification, according to USCIS. This special status also allows approved petitioners to apply for lawful permanent status and creates a pathway to citizenship.
Despite being intended for children, eligibility only requires applicants be under 21, unmarried and in the U.S. at the time of their petition, according to the agency. There are currently no criminal bars or good moral character prerequisites for SIJ petition approval.
These low barriers to entry have allowed a wave of petitions — and approvals — from criminal migrants over the years.
Between 2013 to February 2025, a total of 853 known or suspected gang members submitted SIJ petitions, according to the USCIS study. The vast majority of the individuals were given the green light, with 519 known or suspected MS-13 gangbangers being approved.
In 80% of cases, the government had prior knowledge of their gang affiliation before approval. A slate of other gangbangers — such as Tren de Aragua, 18th Street, Surenos members — have also applied for the program.
What the Trump administration uncovered didn’t stop there.
At least 200 SIJ petitioners arrested for rape, child molestation and other sex crimes were approved into the program since fiscal year 2013, according to the study. At least 120 SIJ petitioners were arrested for murder, nearly 91% of whom were also approved for the program.
When asked how such a program became inundated with bad actors, an administration spokesperson noted that foreign nationals have become adept at exploiting loopholes in the system.
“Like anything in immigration, once there’s a gap or vulnerability identified, it explodes,” USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser stated to the DCNF. “The SIJ program has kind of become the darling of aliens who just don’t have any other way.”
“The way Congress wrote the statue is, at best, ambiguous, and at worst, problematic, but the last administration didn’t do us any favors with the way it was operationalized,” Tragesser continued.
Unlike in other applications where a petition is filed on a foreign national’s behalf — such as when a spouse who marries a noncitizen — applicants for SIJ classification petition themselves, making it that much easier for foreigners to target the program.
A major impact to the program was a lawsuit that largely restricts the agency’s ability to deny applications from potentially dangerous individuals. The settlement from that lawsuit, known as the Saravia settlement and handed down in 2021, currently prohibits USCIS from denying SIJ petitions based on grounds of gang affiliation.
An SIJ approval alone does not confer any immigration benefit such as a green card or work authorization, according to USCIS. While the agency may not always be able to deny an SIJ applicant if they were arrested for murder or another heinous crime, that individual is still amenable to arrest and deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
However, President Joe Biden’s handling of the program effectively rendered it a wholesale amnesty program. In 2022, the Biden administration granted deferred action to foreign nationals given SIJ classification. This policy change not only applied to forward approvals, but also to those who were approved years prior — giving many foreign nationals protection from deportation.
Data show that the program became incredibly more popular with migrants under Biden’s watch.
There were a total of 18,440 individuals who filed for an SIJ petition in 2020, the final year of President Donald Trump’s first term, according to the USCIS study. By 2024 — as Biden was overseeing record-settling levels of illegal immigration — this number skyrocketed to 67,754. Biden’s final year in office was also unique in that migrants over 18 filed more SIJ petitions than those under 18.
“I think it did get worse under the Biden administration,” Edlow stated to the DCNF. “And yes, it has been a pathway that has been exploited by criminal aliens and some gangbangers.”
However, the Trump administration has quickly acted to fix the program, and other major changes are on the horizon.
On June 6, USCIS officially rescinded the Biden-era policy of automatic consideration of deferred action for migrants classified as SIJs, effectively eliminating it as an amnesty program. Additionally, the Saravia settlement will sunset in 2026, meaning gang members and others suspected of gang affiliation will no longer have free rein to enter the SIJ program.
Edlow pledges the Trump White House will focus on cleaning up not just the SIJ program, but all other facets of the U.S. immigration system left in dire straits by the previous administration.
“We already knew there was a misalignment of priorities and resources, but it became painfully obvious that USCIS was acting as kind of the arm of the prior administration to help maneuver [around] the border crisis,” Edlow stated. “And you know, to come back here and realize that, really, fraud was never really something that they were too concerned about.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.